Learn | Create | Prototype | Develop
A weekend to design and prototype a new IoT service

This September, at WebVisions Chicago, Aldo and Abby from Claro ran the first Internet of Things Lab; a weekend where teams of designers, developers, makers and strategists got together to explore the tons of opportunities around developing connected objects and services.

It was a hands-on masterclass and workshop, which got underway at a meet-and-greet on the Friday evening as the WebVisions conference finished. The two days of intensive problem-solving and prototyping then started with coffee and inspiration on the Saturday morning. We shared our perspective of the IoT, then teams dived straight into brainstorming, designing and prototyping new IoT product and service concepts. At Claro, we have designed tools and exercises especially for innovating in this space, and when combined with teams’ own toolkits (think Arduino, hackable devices, coding programs, business plans and musical instruments), the results ended up being both people-centred and technologically thought-out.

It was a great weekend and we hope to hold another IoTLab with passionate IoT Creators somewhere else in the world soon!

Here’s an overview of the teams’ projects, starting with the crowd-voted winner
of the weekend, Begin:

Begin
– Helps you better control the first 60 minutes of your day
An internet-fed clock that puts relevant, real-time information into the context of your schedule and communicates it to you via visuals and sound. For example, “Carry an umbrella and light jacket, and leave in two minutes to catch the number 56 bus”.

FiddleNet
– Helps a violin player to improve their technique and accuracy
Sensors on the student’s violin pick up the sounds coming from the violin, as well as the motion of the bow. This data is visualised on a screen, which gives the student real-time feedback. This feedback is presented in a way that makes a direct correlation between the action of playing the instrument and technical improvement.

YFeel
– Helps the user to better understand the relationship between their diet and their mood
Combines data about the wearer’s feelings, (sensed through the YFeel wristband) with data about the food they eat, with the aim of empowering the user over time to eat and drink to optimise their mood.

Breathe
– Helps the user to control their personal working environment
A modular desktop unit of a stack of devices and sensors, which can read the user’s mood and take action to create a new ambience, reduce stress or energize. This can be through turning on a fan, an ambient lamp, playing a certain type of music or releasing scents into the air.

#Lunchy#
– Creates a delightful experience for kids around eating lunch
A screen on the smart lunchbox enables remote communication between parent and child at mealtime – a message from the parent is displayed, and the parent in turn receives notification that their child is eating. The smart box can also change its graphic decoration, and includes an app for meal planning.